Unhandled Perception

DVD Flick aims to be a simple but at the same time powerful DVD Authoring tool. It can take a number of video files stored on your computer and turn them into a DVD that will play back on your DVD player, Media Center or Home Cinema Set. You can add additional custom audio tracks, subtitles as well as a menu for easier navigation.

Link:
http://www.dvdflick.net

Ubuntu Studio. A multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast as well as professional.

We provide a suite of the best open-source applications available for multimedia creation. Completely free to use, modify and redistribute. Your only limitation is your imagination.

This is more of a quick post about something that may be of interest to the Linux readers. Not sure how old or how actively maintained this is. Check it out and leave a comment if you decide to install it.

Link:
http://ubuntustudio.org/home

Hulu Desktop is a lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer. It features a sleek new look that’s optimized for use with standard Windows Media Center remote controls or Apple remote controls, allowing you to navigate Hulu’s entire library with just six buttons. For users without remotes, the application is keyboard and mouse-enabled. Hulu Desktop is a downloadable application and will work on PCs and Macs. It will initially launch as a beta product during which we plan to gather and incorporate user feedback to improve the service.

Link:
http://www.hulu.com/labs/hulu-desktop

Rockbox is an Open Source replacement firmware for portable digital audio players

Supported Players:

• Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano
  (not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd/4th gen Nano, Classic or Touch)
• Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio
• Cowon: iAudio X5, X5V, X5L, M5, M5L, M3 and M3L
• iriver: iHP100 series, H100 series, H300 series and H10 series
• Olympus: M:Robe 100
• SanDisk: Sansa c200 series, e200 series and e200R series (not the AMS models)
• Toshiba: Gigabeat X and F series (not the S series)

Link:
http://www.rockbox.org/

SUPER is a Multimedia Encoder and a Multimedia Player, easy-to-use with 1 simple click. If you need a simple, yet very efficient tool to convert (encode) or play any Multimedia file, without reading manuals or spending long hours training, then SUPER is all you need. SUPER does NOT require any additional external codec to be installed, absolutely nothing. Necessary codecs are built in!

Link:
http://www.freewaregeeks.com/…

Looking around for some complete movie and TV episodes on video hosting websites I stumbled across Hulu. Glad I did as they have an HD quality The Office episode that I had missed and even more important, they have past It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia episodes. If you haven’t heard or watched It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia check it out on Hulu. Watching in Full Screen works well and the videos stay buffered nicely so there is very little, if any, delays.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/2768/…

The Office in HD:
http://www.hulu.com/hd/45918

Find something good on Hulu? Leave a comment.

Extracts video and audio from FLV files without decompressing or recompressing. The video is saved as AVI (H.263/FLV1 and VP6/VP6F) or raw elementary stream (H.264/AVC). The audio is saved as MP3, AAC (with ADTS headers), or WAV (PCM).

Link:
http://moitah.net/#FLVExtract

Linux has come a long way in support for multimedia and graphics. Today we will see how to transform Ubuntu 8.10 into a media center platform. You can achieve this using various software like MythTV and Boxee, but we’re going to use XBMC Media Center (formerly XBox Media Center).

XBMC is an award winning media center application for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and XBox. The ultimate hub for all your media, XBMC is easy to use, looks slick, and has a large helpful community.

Link:
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/12/09/…

How to convert a DVD format movie (VOB) to VCD (Mpeg1). The reason I had a need to find out how to do this is the Dazzle DVD capture hardware can capture the video to your harddrive in DVD format (VOB) but my DVD player would not recognize the burned media. My DVD player is much more forgiving with a VCD formatted media (Mpeg1).

Software you will need:

• Dazzle DVD Capture**
  
• DGIndex (free)
• TMPGenc (free)
• StarBurn (free)

** Dazzle is only required if you want to capture video from a digital camera or VCR or other video source

Steps:

1. When capturing video from Dazzle make sure its saving it to your harddrive (will create a folder called VIDEO_TS)
2. Convert the VOB file to an Indexed Mpeg2 using a DGIndex (free).

1. Start DGIndex and open the VOB file of your captured video.
2. Now save the project, in the same folder as the VOB file, as a DGIndex project file (d2v).
3. Close DGIndex

1. Start TMPGEnc
2. Choose Video-CD from the wizard and press next
3. Choose the d2v file from Step2 for the video
4. Choose the wav file that was created from Step2 and click next
5. You can set some options on this screen (clip frame is a great way to clean up the rough edges of a captured video)
6. Press until you get to the screen to start processing
7. Save the Mpg file where you want.
8. Close TMPGEnc

Enjoy!

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

Link:
http://images.google.com/hosted/life

Quickly transfer and share your videos on DVD with Dazzle DVD Recorder. Thanks to its plug-in-play simplicity and a step-by step guide, copying your home movies from almost any video device to DVD has never been easier or faster.

I was looking for a way to convert a bunch of VHS tapes to DVD (or mpeg) as I didn’t want to have my VCR hooked up anymore. Did lots of research and cames across Dazzle from Pinnacle. This has got to be the easiest and quickest way as its as simple as connecting the hardware interface between the VCR ‘out’ and a USB2.0 in on my computer and letting the wizard style software do the rest. The software captures the video feed from the VCR and burns it to a DVD.

Now I can finally get rid of my VCR from the living room. Now I keep it in my office for converting tapes to DVD’s…

(more information coming on converting the video from Dazzle (DVD) to VCD or SVCD using only freely available software)

Link:
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/…

WinZip will now compress your JPEG files (digital photos or graphic images) by 20 to 25% and still without any loss of photo quality or data integrity. Now you can send photos faster or fit more on your hard drive and removable media than ever before.

About time someone came up with a method to compress Jpeg images without any additional loss in quality.

Link:
http://www.winzip.com/whatsnew120.htm

First, what is Camtasia Studio:

Imagine being able to show exactly what’s on your screen to anyone, anywhere. Imagine that it’s easy. Now you’ve imagined Camtasia Studio. With the smartest screen recording tools on the planet, Camtasia Studio makes everything from training videos to PowerPoint presentations to lectures look better, reach more people, and pack more punch. Which makes you look even smarter, too.

I have used Camtasia Studio for years now and its an excellent tool that makes creating videos a simple process. From screen recording to post production to publishing the video, everything is logical and easy to do.

Link:
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp

Second, how to enter:
Leave a comment to this post saying one thing you like about Camtasia Studio (at least try it before leaving a comment). Also, in the comment leave your name and email address (use a format like name-a-t-domain-com so spammers won’t pick it up) or use a Blogger account where I can locate your email address to send the registration key to.

I will be selecting at random three comments at the end of the month.

Value: $299.00

A filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday confirms that retailer Best Buy has entered into a deal to completely purchase online music service Napster, for $121 million including $54 million up front.

Why? Where is Best Buy going with this? Are the brick and mortar companies as we know it on the way out the door?

Link:
http://www.betanews.com/…

ImageShack
ImageShack is an intuitive and easy-to-use free media hosting service. It can be used to upload images, flash files, and movies, and share them with friends using any imaginable means.

PhotoBucket
Photobucket is a media-sharing and hosting site that also allows users to upload video clips, edit them using Adobe Remix, and create profiles and portfolios to share.

Picassa Web Albums
Show your photos at their best. View full-screen slideshows, see your pictures arranged on a global map, enjoy video playback, and more.

ShutterFly
Helping you enhance, organize and store your digital photography allows us to provide the highest quality products for you, our customer.

WebShots
Webshots is one of the largest photo- and video-sharing sites.

Zooomr
Everyone can sign-up and share unlimited photos with their family, friends and the entire world as well.